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Joana Hadjithomas + Khalil Joreige

Edited by Clément Dirié and Michèle Thériault

Authors: Dominique Abensour, Etel Adnan, Suzanne Cotter, Jean-Michel Frodon, Rabih Mroué, Jacques Rancière, Michèle Thériault, Jalal Toufic, and Anton Vidokle

June 2013
Co-published by the Leonard & Bina Ellen of Concordia University and JRP Ringier, with the support of the Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris
160 pp., colour and b.w. illustrations

Distribution: Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P.)

$55.00 (paper)
ISBN 978-3-03764-240-5

Also available in French

Since the mid-1990s, Lebanese artists Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige (b. 1969, live and work in Beirut and Paris) have worked together in the visual arts and in cinema, making documentaries and narrative films. In 2008, they presented their narrative feature I Want to See, starring Catherine Deneuve and Rabih Mroué at the Festival de Cannes. In 2012, they completed their documentary The Lebanese Rocket Society. Their practice in both fields is imbued with a distinctive aesthetic that occupies spheres of the visible and the fictional, fostering a fascinating back and forth between life and fiction. Investigative processes, excavation, and the representations of historic, social, cultural, and political factors are at the heart of their practice. In their words: “All our work exists on the frontier of a reality where the question of the territory and its delimitation (that of art, that of personal life), the question of the social body and the individual body, are constantly being posed.”

This first monograph dedicated to these artists is a generously illustrated publication tracing the duo’s bodies of work from the early psycho-geographic mapping of Beirut to recent projects gathered together under the title Lebanese Rocket Society. Essays by Suzanne Cotter, Director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, and cinema critic and historian Jean-Michel Frodon, as well as a conversation held by Michèle Thériault, Director of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal, with fellow artists and thinkers (Jalal Toufic, Etel Adnan, Dominique Abensour, etc.), explore the numerous themes of their practice.